Cholera in Haiti

Breakfast in front of our tent.

Most of the time we don’t have electricity or internet here in Haiti, so communication has been quite a challenge, but so many things have happened already, that we’ll give it a try!

The school is going really well. The students keep surprising us and we are very proud of them. Carla, one of our co-workers who is specialized in bereavement, did a post-trauma counseling with them, and over the last two days the students applied what they learned with more than 100 children of a local primary school. It was so moving to see them in action!

The infection in Johan’s knee and eye are very well under control, and I haven’t even had the slightest pain in my back so far; we are very thankful!

But we do have a special prayer request for the health situation of the people here in Haiti. On Thursday a number of cases of cholera appeared in the St. Marc region some 80 km from Port au Prince. There is a big YWAM base there. The director, Terry Snow, was taking a patient to the hospital that died on the way to the hospital. On the same day 135 people died of cholera, a sickness with heavy diarrhea and vomiting which can cause death in a few hours because of dehydration.

The epidemic did reach the city of Port au Prince yesterday, but we hope and pray that it won’t start spreading although the risks are very high:

• There is a big lack of sanitation systems.

• Everywhere you find little camps with 10-20 tents, mostly without toilet facilities.

• The bigger camps have mostly chemical toilets, but those are difficult to maintain clean, with so many people using them.

• There is almost no running water anywhere.

Some Dutch friends have been assisting in some clinics around St. Marc, but they were telling us about the lack of the most basic things, like IV-fluids, needles, gloves etc…. We hope to be able to help them a little bit through contacts we have with American Doctors, Brazilian army et.

We did buy some extra sanitation hand gel for our students and extra bottles of bleach.

Please pray for protection against cholera, and that the outbreak will be under control very fast.

May God bless you all,

The church and the primary school run by the father of one of our students, collapsed during the earthquake, this is the temporary building.

Our students were busy counseling the kids.

This little girl drew four of her family members who died during the earthquake.

They are having class on the broken pieces of their old church and school.

Johan kept the little ones busy, while some of our students taught the principles of bereavement and trauma counseling to the teachers.

This little three year old girl had been taking care of her 2 year old sister who had come with her to school. At the end of the morning she was soooo tired and fell asleep in my arms. Her mother had died in the earthquake...

The school in Haiti has started with 40 students, what a blessing!

"Bonjour, bonjour!" We hear all around us. We're in Haiti! What a privilege to be here!

The country and the city reminds me a bit of Angola: really very, very little infrastructure, and wonderful friendly people.

We have 40 students; young people who are enthusiastic and very eager to learn. Every pastor of the 30 churches we work with was asked to choose one or two young people from their church to do this school. After the earthquake there are lots of young people who still cannot go back to their schools or universities, as most of those buildings collapsed, and lots of their teachers died. So we had a very large group of youth (120!) who applied to do our school, but we could only accept 40 students, because we do not (yet) have such good facilities and each student costs approximately $ 500 in food and housing for those three months. They cannot pay this themselves, so for the most part (25 students) they are sponsored by Brazilian churches.

We all live in tents with covers of plastic sheeting, which unfortunately is not watertight during the tropical rains that we have here almost every night. The church / school seems a bit like a large tent; the walls are made of blue plastic with a roof from corrugated iron.

There is no running water. Water is purchased from a truck that announces his arrival with a cheerful music of the Titanic (!) Only one or two hours a day we have electricity when the generator is turned on. The bricklayers are still building the toilets for the students to use; hopefully they will put in the doors today! Showering they do outside, with their clothes on (which are also immediately washed) with a bucket and cup ...

Some students lived in nice houses before the earthquake, others were already poor. For all it's a big adjustment to now live very primitively in leaky tents. We have great respect for their positive attitudes. There is not much food, most must be imported, and usually there is only enough for two meals a day: for breakfast a bit of spaghetti with a dash of ketchup, and then for the combined lunch / dinner a large plate of rice with a little beanwater . A sad reality, not only in our school, but all throughout the country.

It is very special to see the hope, resilience, willpower, and happiness of the students. They start each day at half past five in the morning with one and a half hour of prayer and worship. Than at 8 o’clock in the morning until 6 o'clock in the afternoon they have classes.

Johan is teaching these first weeks. His knee has healed well, but he cannot stand yet for a long time, or walk a long way. His eye infection is also slowly healing and he is reducing his medication. At night we rest very well, as we go to bed very early, like most people do here.
We are starting to hear some of the personal stories of pain and sorrow. Yesterday a pastor visited us, the father of one of the students. He told us about the earthquake and about his family. We cannot even start to imagine what they have gone through. In about ten days we will give special classes about trauma and bereavement. Will you pray with us for the students? We hope to train the students in this area, so that they in turn will help others, especially children in the many tent camps around the city.

Please, could you keep on praying for the students and for Johan and me? It's very special to be in Haiti at this time and to work with these young people. We thank God for his faithfulness, and also all of you who have sent us emails to encourage us, who have prayed for us and who have given us financial gifts. We feel very fortunate to have such wonderful compassionate family and friends. Thank you! We wish you God's abundant blessings!

Struggles and victories

Many thanks to everyone who has sent us e-mails last week; it encouraged us so much that you stand with us. Yes, we had to change our plans drastically and unexpectedly. After all the setbacks of the past weeks Johan all of a sudden woke up with a big knee. According to the doctors it could be a bacterial arthritis, a serious condition if it is not treated appropriately and quickly. So last Saturday he was rushed to the operating room, where the inside of the joint of his knee was cleaned. For the next few days he had to stay in the hospital and was on strong intravenous antibiotics.

So our trip to Haiti had to be postponed; we couldn’t go last Monday. Then to top it off, on Tuesday Johan woke up with a severe eye infection. He has ankylosing spondylitis, so that flared up as well. Wednesday he was released from the hospital with lots of medicines and with blood tests, and doctor’s visits marked for Thursday and Friday. We really hoped and prayed to be able to travel to Haiti on the next Monday, but also understood it depended now on the health of Johan, which we put in God's hands. We told each other, “He knows what is best for us, our life is dedicated to Him. If He wants us to go to Haiti he will also make it possible”.

Many people wrote us to say that they believed we were encountering a great spiritual resistance because of our plans to go to Haiti. It is a fact that 200 years ago in Haiti, some mighty men high up in the government, made public pacts with demonic forces. But Johan was personally present in Haiti this year, when exactly one month after the earthquake, a 3 day service was held on the square before the presidential palace. Hundreds of thousands of people came together to fast and pray, to break the demonic bonds, and to enter into a new time where Haiti will be dedicated to the Lord.

Yes there is spiritual warfare going on and there is lots I don’t understand, but one scripture comes to my mind. It is where the Lord Jesus tells Peter (Simon) about his prayer in Luke 22:31: “Simon Simon, satan has asked to sift you as wheat, but I have prayed for you Simon, that your faith might not fail.” It surprises me that Jesus did not pray that Simon would be spared from the attack; He did not tell satan to stop. No, He prayed so Simon’s faith might not fail. So that’s how we want people to pray for us, and how we pray ourselves: “Help us Lord so our faith might not fail.”

And yes, when we came back for the doctors consult yesterday, one of them told us he had never seen somebody recuperate so fast! Thank you Jesus and thanks to all of you who prayed! We will be travelling on Monday to train young Haitian people in the course that will start the 4th of October!

I do not think it will be easy to send emails when we are in Haiti, but if you want to stay informed you can fill in the box on the right, which says: "Subscribe to this blog." Then every time when I post a new message on our blog, you get it automatically in your email.

Thank you all so very much for your love, care, gifts and prayers! May God richly bless you!